Tribeca Festival has returned for its 24th year. The annual arts celebration began exclusively as a film festival in 2002, founded by the trio of Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The events that transpired on 9/11 brought significant damage to Lower Manhattan’s Tribeca, and this festival served as a way of raising funds for the neighborhood.
The following year’s Tribeca Festival doubled its attendance, and that momentum helped catapult it to becoming a yearly event. By 2021, Tribeca Festival began omitting “film” from its name, as it expanded to include video games as well as having a music presence.
ScreenRant‘s Liam Crowley spoke with De Niro and Rosenthal to discuss the origins of Tribeca Festival, how 2025’s event shattered one of its records, and De Niro’s anniversary screenings and panels of both Casino and Meet The Parents this year.
Tribeca Festival Was In The Works Before The September 11 Attacks
“Then this happened. What about the festival now, for the community?”
Tribeca Festival’s inaugural event was expedited due to the 9/11 attacks, but the concept existed prior to that tragic day.
“We had started even before 9/11. We were thinking about just what it would be like,” De Niro explained.
“It was just a random sort of conversation, nothing was to be expected from it. But then [9/11] happened, and I think Jane said, ‘Well, what about the festival now, for the community?’ We had done other things. Dinner downtown, took busloads of people, Chinatown, Little Italy from all this area. Eventually, we just said let’s do it, and got hold of people to start it up and that was it.”
It didn’t take long for momentum to snowball once De Niro and Rosenthal got the green light.
“We did that first festival in 120 days.”
“It was really about what we could do for our community, to bring people back downtown to give our neighbors a new memory of something to look forward to,” Rosenthal added. “I think our atтιтude was, ‘Okay, if you can produce a film in three months, you could produce a festival in three months. Of course, we knew nothing about sponsors or anything like that. Miraculously, the film festival came off. The first festival was four days, and now it’s 10 days. And here we are, it’s 24 years later. It’s kind of crazy.”
Tribeca Festival 2025 Breaks Project Submission Record
“We have a really robust program…”
Tribeca Festival has only continued to grow exponentially in the years since. In 2025, Tribeca Festival received 13,451 project submissions for both feature-length and short films.
“An extraordinary group of programmers led by Cara Cusumano, our festival director, and a great group behind her that looks to curate the best program,” Rosenthal said, praising Tribeca’s selection committee. “You can hope to find new voices in our compeтιтions. We have a really robust program, and it’s a great way to sample what is going on in entertainment more broadly, including what goes on in the influencer and creative world.”
Two of the projects that are getting spotlight at this year’s event are Casino and Meet The Parents, two crown jewels in De Niro’s catalog that celebrate their 30th and 25th anniversaries this year, respectively. “It’s a nice thing to be able to share the films with the other people involved with it,” De Niro said of his anniversary screenings at this year’s Tribeca Festival.
“[Casino with] Marty [Scorsese], and Meet The Parents with Ben Stiller and Jay Roach and John Hamburg and everybody. It’s great to be able to fold that into the festival and to be something that people would want to see.”
Tribeca Festival runs from June 4-15.
Source: ScreenRant Plus
Tribeca Film Festival
